Search This Blog

Hypnagogia Horrors

I don't know if you've ever experienced this. I have. And it's scarier than any nightmare I've ever had. Although I should qualify that by saying I rarely remember what I dream about.

But I'm not talking about dreams here. I'm talking about what occurs sometimes before I dream. You know, in that period of time between being awake and drifting off to la-la land.

I had to look it up on Wikipedia and the term for that transitional period is hypnagogia.

Some nights I think I'm channeling Stephen King, Dean Koontz and H.P. Lovecraft all rolled into one. As I start to drift off my mind races, going off in several different directions, kind of like twilight ADD, trying to process the scariest of thoughts. I certainly wouldn't come up with them during the day time, nor likely dream about them in my deepest slumbers.

But they come to me in that transitional time between wakefulness and sleep. Involuntarily.

Like, oh, I don't know, sticking a pencil in my eyeball. Gory car, plane, train crashes involving loved ones. Leaping to my death off a bridge or tall building. A visit to an alien spaceship - probing optional. Murder and mayhem. Spontaneous combustion. The earth exploding and other similar apocalyptic cataclysms haunt me. And of course, the more bizarre and horrifying they are the more I have and the harder it is to sleep. Some nights this "transitional" period will go on for hours.

But what causes them? Restless Leg Syndrome? Inane Facebook comments? Indigestion? A late evening piece of chocolate cake? Too much caffeine? The late night news?

Well, let's see what I'm influenced by during my waking hours.

Ah, a huge earthquake and many after shocks rocked Japan and blew up a nuclear plant.

Um, Lindsay Lohan could be going to jail.

Uh, Mike Huckabee crapped all over Natalie Portman and her unmarried approach to parenthood.

Oh, the Warlocks and tigers and Adonises, oh my, are pissed at Charlie Sheen. Nevertheless the guy's mounted something called "My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not An Option Tour" and it sold out in 18 minutes!

Mel Gibson pled no contest to beating the crap out of his ex-wife and skipped jail time.

Well, well. Monica Lewinsky still loves Bill.

That guy's still hangin' on to power in Libya and nobody seems to know yet how to properly spell his name.

And the National Hockey League seems to have become the medical clearing house for the largest supply of organ donations from former players for brain research.

My local university's basketball team failed to make the NCAA playoffs. That's a bitch! Maybe I'll have a hypnogoiac (sp?) dream about that. Like bus fulls of basketball teams running off of toll bridges or something.

meleah rebeccah: I've done that too! Wake up as you feel like your slamming down on the mattress. Weird, huh? I looked it up and it's apparently known as a hypnagogic myoclonic twitch or “Hypnic jerk”. Amazingly enough, close to 70 percent of all people experience this phenomenon just after nodding off. Wow.

Popular posts from this blog

Bob and Brenda worked in the supermarket. They weren't check-out clerks. And they weren't stock-boys. Brenda sure wasn't. And they weren't employees who worked in the fish section or the deli. No. They were on the shelves.

They hadn't been on the shelves very long but in that short time they'd developed a considerably close friendship.

The chatted all day when the store was busy and at night when the store was closed. They talked about everything. The talked about what raw products they came from. The talked about their manufacturing processes. And they talked about the long routes in semi-trailers that brought them to this store.

Oddly enough the one thing they never made clear to one another was just what product each of them was.

One day when Brenda was commenting on their friendship she told Bob she was grateful for their amity. "Are you Tea?" said Bob, pekoe-ing her way. "I thought I was Tea". You're coffee!"